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London 2012: Alexandre Despatie competes in his fourth Olympics, supportive parents at his side: DiManno

Christiane Despatie watched her diving champion son as he bled from a brutal head wound; now she and husband, Pierre, are in London to cheer him on again.

Alexandre Despatie dives off the three metre springboard during a training session at the Aquatic Centre before the London 2012 Olympic Games in London. (STEVE RUSSELL / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

Alexandre Despatie resurfaces after a dive off the one metre springboard during a training session at the Aquatic Centre before the London 2012 Olympic Games in London. (STEVE RUSSELL / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

LONDON — No video exists of The Accident. But Christiane Despatie knows she could not bear watching anyway.

That was her boy, her baby, bleeding from a ghastly head wound — half a world away.

Nor will Alexandre permit his mother to look at the photographic record documented during emergency surgery in Madrid a month ago to repair his broken brainpan. “He told me that he would never, in my life as a mom, show me these pictures — because they opened his head, from one side to the other.”

It was far worse than has been let on.

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“A major injury, a lot more than what has been written,” reveals Christiane, shuddering. “We didn’t want to say much at the time. So we said just that it was 10 centimetres. Actually, he was scalped.”

What viewers of the Olympic springboard competition will see, in TV close-ups, is the thin filament of stitchery just below Alexander’s hairline, temple to temple. What the blogosphere has been spared — a rare occasion, during a training session in Spain, when nobody was capturing events on hand-held gadgetry — are images of Alexandre’s forehead peeled back after calamitous contact with the board, the gaping gash, the gushing of blood.

“That explains the big bandage people saw in the pictures after,” says his mom.

She was in Montreal and learned of the accident by text message, followed by a phone call from diving coach Arturo Miranda. “Arturo was trying to tell me something but it wasn’t coming out right. I couldn’t understand at first. Then he said, ‘Well, it’s the head.’ I asked: ‘What’s the damage?’”

She wonders about that, even now, and is a little bit appalled. “I never even thought of asking, is he alive? It was a while before I was able to get some sense out of (Arturo). He said it was a huge cut but, whew, Alexandre was lucky because it was on the hairline.”

Some lucky.

Christiane wanted to jump on a plane immediately but was urged against it. Alexandre would be coming home soon and it was best she wait there. In fact, the veteran diver — just turned 27 but a fixture in elite diving for more than half his lifetime — had deliberately withheld the worrisome details from his parents, Christiane and Pierre. “He didn’t want us knowing the truth.”

That just makes her mad because Christiane believes neither she — a doctor’s daughter — nor her husband is the twitchy, panicky type. “Finally I got the truth from someone else.”

That truth was grim and the timing of Alexandre’s accident — clipping the board on an inward 3 ½, a dive with his back to the water, spinning towards the perch he’s just jumped from — disastrous, very much casting in jeopardy his participation in a fourth career Olympic Games.

“When he came home, we tried to make life easier for him and kept him away from the media,” says Christiane.

Alexandre had suffered a Level 1 concussion — he wasn’t knocked unconscious. Yet it was plenty hideous, ugly and frightening. Any head trauma is serious but the severity was downplayed for public consumption and Alexandre was cocooned whilst recovering.

“He had to stay calm,” explains Christiane, recalling the dim in-between world her son inhabited through that first fortnight. “He couldn’t listen to music. He couldn’t even watch a movie. He had to stay in a dark room.”

He certainly couldn’t rotate, which meant not even minimal training, and missing two Grand Prix events in Europe that would have brought him to optimum Olympics pitch. Alexandre has been racing, in the last two weeks since receiving medical clearance, to compensate for that layoff.

On Friday, Despatie took his first practice dives at the Olympic pool here. But it’s been a close thing.

“He’s followed the doctor’s return protocol closely, by the word,” Christiane insists. “So many discussions, back and forth, but finally, after about 10 days, he had the doctor’s OK. My husband and I told him, this is your decision, we won’t try to influence you either way.”

Alexandre put his faith in the doctors and his mother put her faith in him. “I have 100 per cent confidence in Alexandre, that he will be fine.” Her reassurance came when a team member emailed footage of her son executing the same inward 3 ½ during training a week ago in Rome. “For me, seeing that was very emotional. But he did it really well. That’s when I knew he was fine.

“I have 100 per cent confidence in Alexandre. If parents don’t put all their confidence in their child athlete, don’t come to the Olympics, stay home and hide.”

She and Pierre have been there all along the way, from Sydney to Athens to Beijing and now London. From the time he was a youngster, they recognized their little boy was something special in the water. “It was a year by year evolution, he was getting better and better and better, and we realized this was actually easy for him. Some kids, some human beings, are made to do these kinds of things. At one point it became very clear that he was like that, the destiny was there.”

Some of us were there, too, when a 13-year-old Alexandre made a gosh-almighty debut splash at the 1998 Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur, the half-pint kid who came out of nowhere to cop gold on the 10-metre platform.

Alexandre doesn’t do 10 m platform anymore. On 3 m springboard, though, he’s twice won Olympic silver, despite a series of ill-timed injuries. In Beijing, he did it with a recently broken foot and bad back.

As a mom and cheerleader-in-chief, Christiane has her son’s back. Yet often, during competition, she can hardly stand to peek. “I want to die. I’m breathless, I’m speechless, my heart explodes. But I always tell Pierre, this is going to last 45 minutes and then it’s going to be over.”

Stress is for the parents. Alexandre is cool as a glass of water.

Says his mom: “His fuel is pressure.”

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